


The Craziest Person I’ve Met This Week

by Fluffyllama (Llama)



Category: Crossover - Fight Club / Harry Potter, Fight Club (1999), Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-24
Updated: 2011-08-24
Packaged: 2017-10-23 00:51:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/244440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llama/pseuds/Fluffyllama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a self-help group for everything these days.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Craziest Person I’ve Met This Week

**Author's Note:**

> Written for crossover_hp, for vilgsacolin.

With his cock halfway down my throat, John says, “I wish I had died.”

When your jaw is stretched wide open you can barely move your tongue, let alone speak. You concentrate, breathe through your nose, and follow the rhythm. He jerks, he comes, you swallow.

Get it wrong and you panic, choke, spit up.

He says, “I’m just a shadow without him”, but the cock is real. The cock is always real. The throb of the vein against your lip, the tingle in your mouth, the hair caught in your teeth.

“What did you say your name was?”

And it occurs to me, sitting there on the edge of the bed with my fingers clutching onto two hairy fucking thighs, that yet again this is because of Marla Singer. Marla. The hair stuck in my teeth that just won’t budge.

Because of Marla, I haven’t slept in a week. Because of Marla, I’m walking the streets on alternate Sunday nights while she puffs her way through ascending bowel cancer at Trinity Episcopal.

Or I was until I found Inner Peace.

“Excuse me. May I sit here?”

One glimpse of the church hall through the rain and I was in there faster than a drunk spotting a late bar. I know what bare boards and strip lighting mean. These places are all identical for a reason. People don’t cry the same way in carpeted rooms.

“Sure.”

“Thank you.”

This is how I met John Lupin.

He wasn’t the usual type. Shabby suit, greying hair. Lined, worn face. Sounds like your average cancer or TB case, right?

Wrong. Not this guy. There was something about him.

“Hi.”

He nodded, as if I should start, but I don’t do that shit. What was the group called again? Inner Peace, right.

My knee had a twitch only I could see. I needed this. I needed to sleep.

“Is it always like this?”

There’s maybe fifteen people in a room that would be empty with a hundred. A cough here, a tear there, and in-between the whispers. Sunday school chairs, Sunday school teachers. Dusty floorboards, grey faces. Basketball hoops and crutches.

Probably.

“Yes.”

You don’t come to these places for the décor.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s been happening to you?”

You can drift a while when you ask that one, then wake up for the juicy bits.

The windows were dark, my reflection darker. If I tilted my chair, the light played tricks on me. Light hair, dark hair. Clean-shaven, stubble.

Rock backwards, rock forwards. His voice was hoarse, but soothing.

And then it stopped.

“Sorry, I…” Rock backwards, rock forwards. “I think I missed the last bit there.”

“My friend died. I moved here.”

“That’s a sad story.”

The guy wasn’t exactly screaming with rage. What did a Brit with the traditional stiff upper lip need with Inner Peace?

“I’ve only been here a week. It’s all a bit confusing. Very different from home, though it’s nice to find some people with the same…” He paused. “…problems.”

Then he leaned forward.

“Tell me something. Do you prefer ‘lycanthrope’ or ‘werewolf’?”

This is how I came to fall off my chair.

In 1732, a teenage boy in rural Germany claimed he had transformed into a wolf and devoured his family. Their remains were never found, but his were. I get that. We’ve all had problem neighbours.

In 1933, a man was discovered dressed in wolf furs in the forests of Romania, apparently incapable of human speech. Investigations found he was from a respectable Bucharest family and had only been missing for six months. He lived another twenty years, and never did more than howl.

Delusion. Fear of adult responsibility. Body shape disorder. However we rationalise it, the werewolf has stalked humanity for centuries, and it’s alive and well in modern America.

All it needed to be mainstream was a self-help group.

“Werewolf.”

“Yes. I was wondering if the term ‘werewolf’ is acceptable here? So far all I’ve seen is ‘lycanthrope’, but that’s rather vague. It’s so easy to offend, isn’t it?”

Sure it is. I make social faux pas about werewolf terminology all the time.

“No, I think werewolf is fine.”

He seemed happy with that. There was something charming about the crooked smile he gave me.

Across from us a woman with faded red hair sobbed on the shoulder of a thin little man. His fingers clutched tightly at her sleeve, and sweat made his head shine in the harsh lighting.

“Let’s all try hugging our partners now.”

John was a lot stronger than he looked.

When you can’t sleep, you see a lot of coffee shops. You flit in and out of them, attracted by those same artfully bare plaster walls and too-bright lights. A home away from home, where the coffee always tastes the same.

“Hello again.”

And sometimes the company does too.

“Hi. Can I make that to go instead?”

“I hope I’m not scaring you away.”

He wasn’t joking, but I laughed anyway.

“You? No. You’re not even the craziest person I’ve met this week.”

His laugh was the least British thing I’d ever heard. Rough and rusty, maybe, but loud and even more out of place than him.

“I know you’re not a werewolf.”

No shit. That must have been a tough call. Just what my life needed; another faker on the block.

“You got me. But don’t worry. The lycanthropy thing? It isn’t my scene. It’s all yours.”

“Really.”

“Just don’t expand into bowel cancer or anything. I’ve made all the deals I’m making on that one.”

“I see.” He ruffled his hair, looking faintly puzzled. “I’ll leave you alone, then.”

“I’m not alone.”

“Right.”

Of course, the waitress chose that moment to slosh my coffee down.

“One latte to go.”

I didn’t need to see his face.

“I’m cooking. If you’re hungry…”

He had this bulging bag of groceries, god knows where from at that time of night. I knew the contents of my cupboards backwards – one can of out-of-date tuna is the same whichever way you look at it.

“I’m not gay, you know.”

“Oh dear. And my moussaka is poisonous to all known heterosexuals.”

“Very funny.”

This time when he told me his life story, I listened.

Remus John Lupin. Brought up in England, went to some fancy school. The things they say about those English boarding schools? Seems they’re all true. He worked hard, taught on and off, but nobody wants his kind teaching their kids when there are drug addicts and child molesters who can do the job.

He had a friend. We both knew what sort. He died. Shit happens.

A sad but not overly outrageous tale, compared to some you hear.

Except for the part about being bitten by a werewolf when he was six years old.

“You don’t believe me.”

“No, I don’t. But your moussaka is incredible.”

We drank, we talked, we laughed. And somewhere between the last glass of wine and the conversation running out, he put his hand on my leg.

“I told you, I’m not gay.”

“You’re not a werewolf, either.”

“Neither are–”

“And you don’t have bowel cancer.”

“No…”

“Or tuberculosis.”

“No. But—”

But he was right. I was a lot of things I wasn’t, one night a week.

And now we add another to a very long list.

I was seventeen all over again. The groping, fumbling, desperate sex.

“Ahhhh, Jesus, put your hand–”

“There?”

The panting, humping, ridiculous, first-time sex.

“Stop, wait… god, is it meant to hurt like this?”

“It gets… better. Mostly.”

The sort you think you’ll never have again, and you’re usually right.

“I think you broke me.”

His laugh was hoarse, and tore at my throat just to hear.

“You must be ten years younger than me. I’m sure you’ll live.”

I wasn’t so sure.

“Why did you come here, really?”

“It’s hard to explain. Just… things happening back home.”

“Things?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said, and kissed me.

If you don’t say anything, people always assume you agree with them.

“Society rejects the unacceptable to keep it clean,” he said into the half-dark. “But it dirties its hands in the process. Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the darkness is contagious.”

I could have listened to that voice for hours. It didn’t seem to matter what he was saying. It was as if he was speaking past me, to some part of me I’d never seen. Maybe it was only there when I shut my eyes.

“Some of… _us_ … want to embrace the darkness inside; turn the negative into a positive. They call that freedom. I call it mayhem.”

He had a mark on his wrist. A brand. Where in the world do they still brand people? Not in Britain, that’s for sure. Somewhere they lock you up for being insane, for being a fag; whatever the us was he kept talking about.

“It’s the same for both sides. Take away the humanity from any group and what are you left with?”

I knew the answer to that one. It made the blood tingle in my veins, a thrill run through every nerve in my body.

It made some deep down part of me want to fling the windows and doors open and howl at the moon.

“A pack of wolves.”

It made me want to fuck him.

And I did. There on that shabby, creaking little bed already sticky with my sweat and come. I fucked him until he begged me to stop and growled for more in the same breath; until I forgot my own name; until I could swear there were two, three, four shadows flickering across the wall that shook under the thump of the headboard and the protests of the neighbours.

Drunks don’t sleep that well, never mind babies.

With bloodshot eyes and a bruised lip, John says, “I’m glad we did this.”

We did this.

I did this.

He looks more solid this morning. Naked is always more real.

“So, you’ll be at the group on Sunday?”

Fuck that bitch Marla. She can have bowel cancer every week if she wants it so bad.

“There won’t be a meeting next weekend.”

“There won’t?”

“Full moon.”

Full moon, he says. Just like that, and his cock is at my lips again.

With your mouth stretched too wide to talk, you have no choice. You concentrate, breathe through your nose, and follow the rhythm. He jerks, he comes, you…

Panic. Choke. Spit up.

I left him watching from the window. He didn’t say another word. By the time the full moon had come and gone, liver disease at First Calvary had filled my Sunday evening slot. I never saw John again.

But every time I see the full moon, I give a little howl for him.

I mean, what the hell. The world is full of crazy people.

Right, Tyler?


End file.
